


only bad people live to see their likeness set in stone (so what does that make me)

by amessofgaywords



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, a very elaborate backstory for lena, and also mentions of physical abuse, but with kara by her side it gets better, give lena luthor all the hugs, i feel a little bad for hurting her, i love lena luthor with my whole heart, i love this soft sweet gay, lena has had a rough life everyone, she feels so responsible and it's so sad, specifically mentions of suicide and panic attacks, the author is very sorry for the pain in this fic, this took me a literal year to write, tw for mental health stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-26 07:14:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20926238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amessofgaywords/pseuds/amessofgaywords
Summary: Lena does not believe in fate. She never has, and she doesn’t believe she ever will. If fate existed, it wouldn’t have stolen her mother from her when she was four years old, wouldn’t have put her in the company of the Luthors, wouldn’t have made her the unhappiest she’s ever been.or an incredibly in-depth lena backstory au featuring lots of exes, family drama, soft gays, and a side of bad coping mechanisms.





	only bad people live to see their likeness set in stone (so what does that make me)

**Author's Note:**

> phew. here it is, finally: the lena luthor backstory au i've been working on for ages. this is mostly canon up to about 3x05, when it branches off so i can give it a nice, pretty ending. i tried to make it match known facts about lena as much as possible, with some of my own little twists, please, enjoy. tw: panic attacks, mental health talk, a few brief lines about self-harm. 
> 
> title from still sane by lorde.

Lena Luthor does not believe in fate.

She never has, and she doesn’t believe she ever will.

If fate existed, it would not have led her mother to Glenealo Valley that cold, rainy day in May and convinced her to swim out to the freezing cold water at the base of Turlough Hill. Fate could not have been so cruel as to make Lena watch as her mother drowned, slowly, oh so slowly, the life lifting out of her lungs and evaporating with the late morning dew on the leaves of the trees that towered around her (young, she’s still so young, how can she live without her _máthair_?) The universe, if it ever cared at all, would not have orphaned her when she was four years old, would not have put her in the company of the Luthors, would not have made her the unhappiest she’s ever been.

(But whose fault is it, really? What loving daughter, what _good person_, watches their mother drown and can’t run, can’t scream, can’t move? What kind of monster do you have to be to watch someone die and do absolutely nothing at all?)

Lena’s just barely four (and no closer to forgetting) when Lionel Luthor picks her up from the orphanage she’s been staying at for a few months in County Wicklow and takes her to a mansion in Southern California, in the United States, where she’s never been. She meets the rest of his family: Lillian, his wife, who is cold and unyielding and cruel in a way she doesn’t know to be wary of yet, Lex, his son, who’s smart and eight years older and Lillian’s favorite, and Margarita, the maid, who cooks for her and lets her sit in the basement laundry room while she does the washing.

Lena remembers her first night in that impossibly big house, clinging to the brand new _teidí_ Lionel had bought her and muffling her cries into its soft fur. She remembers coming down the big stairs for breakfast in the morning, Lillian judging the red streaks staining her cheeks. She remembers Lex giving her an extra piece of sausage when no one was looking.

It was winter when she came to live with the Luthors; she knows because she couldn’t stop wondering where all the snow was. As it would happen, snow isn’t the only thing the Luthors didn’t have that time of year.

It’s foggy now, but she still remembers the way her _máthair_ had bought a tree on the first of December and they had spent all night decorating it, how she sang carols with the pure voice of an angel, how they anxiously awaited the morning together, guessing what _Daidí na Nollag_ would bring. It had been her favorite time of here, back then; their neighbors had given them cookies and special songs played on the little radio and everything was merry and bright.

Luthor Christmases are nothing like that. Margarita makes them a good dinner and Lex gives her a gift, a polished new chess set (she’s weirdly good at the game), but there is no warmth, no songs, and the tree is store bought, towering imposingly over the front entryway, acting like a warning.

(Later in life, Lena loses her love of the holiday. The memories are too painful, and it’s not like she has anyone to celebrate with anyway.)

Lena gradually realizes that Lillian isn’t the best of mothers, but she doesn’t definitively know that until she’s almost five and being sent to first grade (a year ahead of where she should be, because her new mother tells her she’s a Luthor and Luthors are stronger, smarter, and better). The first day, she makes a friend named Lucy.

Lucy comes from an army family, and her dad is just like Lillian: strict and cold. But he still picks Lucy up from school in the afternoons and calls her “teacup” and asks her about her day. If the Luthors’ driver is busy, sometimes Lena has to wait outside the junior high for Lex to pick her up and walk her home.

In November, around her birthday, Lena asks if she can go to Lucy’s house after school. Lillian is unwilling, but Lionel knows General Lane, Lucy’s father, and gives his blessing. She’s so thankful to her father she helps him organize his papers later because she knows he needs the extra help. He never thanks her.

That Friday, Lena gets into General Lane’s big truck with Lucy. He’s quiet the whole way there, but Lucy chatters about a boy she hates who likes to sniff the glue they use in art and Lena tries to stay calm and unworried.

The house is warm and smells good when they get there, though, and everyone is very kind and generous. Lucy has an older sister named Lois who is a few years older than them, and she’s nice and talks to Lena about her school and wishes her a happy early birthday, just like Lex.

But Lucy’s mother is what surprises her. Instead of ignoring them when they get home, she gives them celery and cookies (although she says not to tell anyone), and helps Lucy with the math homework she can’t figure out. Lena doesn’t understand how a mother could be so nice. Too many months at Luthor Manor have clouded her memories, made her lose sight of those happy days with her real mother, if she wasn’t just a figment of her imagination.

Mrs. Lane makes them pasta with meatballs and homemade rolls for dinner and lets them eat more cookies for dessert, and all too soon General Lane is driving them home.

When Lena arrives, the house is silent and cold, Margarita the only one up and about. The kind woman helps her clean up and tucks her into bed and kisses her on the cheek.

Lillian never asks how the playdate went, and Lena doesn’t offer the information. She gets the message from the woman’s unyielding silence; the Luthor household does not care for warm family dinners and after school homework help. So she keeps it to herself.

Lucy asks her over again a few weeks later, but it’s around Christmas time and the Luthors are going away to Dublin for a couple of weeks (even though it’s not really home, it’s where she had lived, her roots in the beautiful Irish moors, and she’s beyond excited) and Lena says she can’t come. Lucy is disappointed, but she understands.

Those two weeks in Dublin, Lena’s second Christmas with the Luthors, is one of her only happy memories from childhood. Lionel spends the whole time working, and Lillian barely pays any attention to them, so her and Lex sneak out every day to walk along the cobblestoned streets. Every day, Lex will take Lena to look at the ducks in the pond in the park by their hotel, just because she asks him to. They eat lunch at riverside cafes and no one looks at them weird even though they’re thirteen and six and by themselves in a foreign city. They sit in the park in the afternoons and talk about grand devices they’ll build, like a huge flying suit that will save millions of people, with tons of fancy gadgets, their own personal superhero.

When they get home, to boring old Metropolis and the cold, dark house, sometimes she sneaks into Lex’s room and he shows her the pictures he took on his camera, of the duck pond and the streets and the food they ate, and it makes her feel happy for a little while.

Lucy likes hearing about Ireland, but when Lena talks about their fancy hotel or the limo they drove around in, she gets nervous and fidgety. Lena doesn’t get why until she goes over to Lucy’s house late January, and finally sees that it’s only two floors and on a street surrounded by houses just like it, and they don’t have a pool and the bedrooms are cramped and small. It’s that day she realizes just how much money the Luthors have in comparison to everyone else, and she never brings up the difference again.

Over second and third grade, Lena starts advancing more and more in classes – especially science and math – even getting extra work assigned to her from her teachers. Lucy calls her “teacher’s pet” (affectionately, of course) and Lex tells her she’s a genius, but neither Lillian nor Lionel mention it to her at home. By this point, she’s well past expecting praise from them, even when she fixes one of Lionel’s broken watches after school when she’s bored. Praise isn’t in the Luthor blood.

When Lena’s eight, in June before third grade is over, Lex has his first episode. He’s seventeen, almost a senior in high school, and with time he’s pulling away from Lena more and more. Instead of picking her up from school, he leaves her to walk home to the Luthor Manor alone, and he doesn’t talk to her much anymore at meals. Nights are spent buried in his labs, tinkering with some device or another, and Lena has caught him making weird phone calls more than once. Every once in a while, he’ll take her on a drive like he used to, but he’s so much more withdrawn, and Lena worries about him.

He goes off on them that night, screaming about how unfair he thinks school is. Lena lurks in the hall closet so she can watch as he yells at their father, about the alien that has just recently transferred to their school. It’s the first time she remembers ever being truly scared of him.

It’s at the start of what the Luthors like to call the _alien takeover_. Superman has just come out of the cape closet, if you will, and it’s spurred on thousands of aliens worldwide to come forward about their true origins, including a few there in upper class Metropolis, at the prestigious private school Lena and Lex attend. It’s shameful, Lex says, that they’re letting him graduate, despite his clear lack of _empathy_ and _understanding_ and _brain power_ needed to function in a _human_ world.

He throws a chair that night, and then he gets in his car and drives off to god knows where.

Lena hears the whispered conversation between her mother and her father from the closet once he’s gone. She hears them worry that Lex will ruin the family image with his breakdowns and fits, that he’s not suitable for Luthor life. She eavesdrops as they debate his point of view, as they validate everything he’s said, all the gross inaccuracies that had made Lena sick. Lillian supports him, but Lionel is anxious that when the time comes, Lex will make bad decisions for LuthorCorp.

Never once do they discuss the fate of the poor alien boy.

It makes her sad, a little. She loves Lex with all her heart, and although she expects this from Lillian, she trusted Lionel, looked up to him, and his and Lex’s opinions rock her to her core. She thought they were good, but now she doesn’t know what to think.

That night makes Lena look at everything differently. When she starts fourth grade, she starts to notice what other people say about their families. No one else is complaining that their parents are worried for their reputations. No one in elementary school is talking about illegal aliens and dangerous off-worlders. The Luthors have always respected Lena’s intelligence (or thought she wasn’t a threat) by openly discussing things in front of her, but it seems that other families usually don’t care about things like the home planet of the captain of the soccer team.  
She notices something peculiar as well: suddenly, in fourth grade, everyone’s starting to realize how cute everyone else is, and people are getting crushes and talking about kissing and it’s very, very weird.

Lena knows, from television and books and movies, that she is supposed to get a crush on a sweet, athletic boy and kiss him in the rain as some big, romantic gesture, but when she looks at all the boys in her grade, she doesn’t find any of them very attractive at all. She’s only nine, but kissing kids like Josh Michaelson or Tyler Brady just doesn’t _excite_ her like she knows it should.

Lucy agrees with her completely. Lucy’s ten already, and because she’s already hit double digits, she’s decided that she’s more informed than Lena on matters of the heart. In fact, Lucy makes a big decision: her and Lena should just kiss one another, just to get it over with, and then they don’t have to think about their first kiss ever again.

Lena, in her scientific, logical mind, thinks this is a terrific plan. In the more… hysterical part of her mind, the one that she’s neglected since becoming a Luthor, she’s panicking. It’s strange, because when she thinks about kissing Josh or Tyler, she never gets this nervous.

They make a plan to do it after school one day, during the homework center where Lena likes to stay to help Lucy with her work. That Wednesday, Lena can barely eat, she’s so nervous. But she’s glad she’s doing it with someone she trusts, that way she doesn’t have to worry about it later.

The two friends walk to the library, but after about ten minutes ask to go to the bathroom and sneak off down the stairs and outside.

It’s March, so it’s sort of cold, and they have to sit near the big radiator outside to keep warm. They press up close together and giggle like they’re sharing a secret, and then they lean in and suddenly there are lips on Lena’s and it’s such a strange sensation, like a bird swooping through her stomach, that she pulls back immediately.

“There!” Lucy announces after she does. “Now it’s done!”

She stretches out a hand for Lena to take, and she does, and they go back inside and that’s that. Lena feels giddy and warm and she’s shaking, and she wonders if that’s what kissing feels like all the time.

Soon, though, the school year is over, and Lucy with it. She’s going away with her family, to Colorado, for two whole months; by the time she gets back Lena will be gone too, but she doesn’t know that yet.

That summer sees Lena alone in her room, often working on her basic chemistry set or reading Lex’s engineering books in his room when he’s out, and studying LuthorCorp blueprints whenever she has the time.

In early August, Lillian knocks on Lena’s door and tells her that she won’t be returning to her elementary school in the fall. Instead, she’s going to a boarding school in Boston, far, far away from Metropolis and everyone she knows.

It’s the first, and last, time Lena tries to argue with her mother. Lillian shuts her down at once, claiming that without Lex in the house the next year she doesn’t want a little girl on her hands. Lena wants to protest that Margarita is the only one who takes care of her, but it’s for naught.

That’s when she learns it’s impossible to fight a Luthor.

So Lena sends Lucy a letter in Colorado explaining, and in late August goes with her father to the airport. She doesn’t sleep on the flight to Boston, instead watching as California fades from view, childishly wondering if she’ll ever return.

(It’s not childish because _of course_ she knows she’ll return. It’s childish because she’s hoping for something to come back to, some sort of permanent home, and Luthors do not hope. Luthors master the situation. Luthors do not let others control them.

Ironically, all Lena does is let the Luthors control her.)

Fifth grade in boarding school is when Lena learns that the carefree days of her younger years are gone. No one in Boston is like Lucy, free and wild and wonderful, and no one seems all that willing to be friends with her, either. She’s been enrolled in all advanced classes, but she learned half of the curriculum over the summer herself anyway, so the days are boring, and the nights are worse. She has no science books to study, and even if she did lights out is 9:00 and it would be pointless to try to push it. She’s learned, through year after year at the Manor, that a Luthor does not break the rules.

By the time Lena is ten and her first year at boarding school comes to a close, she realizes two things. Firstly, she’s better off alone. She likes the silence and the solitude that comes from reading alone in the corner at lunch.

Secondly, she can’t look desperate. She can’t depend on friends (if she had them), she can’t look even slightly unsettled at all. She can’t fail, can’t be warm or kind, can’t laugh or joke or make mistakes. She can’t afford to. She is a Luthor, and there is a punishment for every mistake.

That summer, her mother is harder on her than ever. Lex doesn’t come back from college in New York, and Lionel spends all his time away on business, so every second Lillian’s eyes are trained on Lena. (She loses count how many times she gets pinched or hit to be taught a lesson. Lillian’s methods are barbaric but effective, and Lena cowers when her lab partner tries to give her a high five.)

After a summer of abuse, Lena boards an eastbound plane alone, resolute. She returns to Boston a different person than she was before; she knows not to let trivial things like the other girls and their admittedly pathetic insults get to her. She dives deep into her classes, takes extra work where it is offered, and stops spending any time in the public spaces on campus. She becomes a nonentity, her purpose to learn and observe. And observe she does.

For her eleventh birthday, Lillian sends her a check and Margarita, meant to be a chaperone for a weekend out shopping. Lena has some ideas.

She spends all of the money on new clothes. She’s seen how the girls dress at her school on weekends and days off: designer jeans and pretty blouses and tight, sophisticated dresses. She upends her wardrobe, buying fancy blazers and tight pants, even going to tailors to get fitted formal wear. When she gets back to her dorm, she dumps all of her old clothes in a laundry basket and gives them to Margarita, making her promise to pass them on to her young daughter.

She keeps only her favorite flannel and her science tee shirts for sleeping in, and she makes a promise to herself to abandon the casual part of her personality. She’s spent the past few months crafting a not-to-be-touched, stone-cold image of herself that her clothes must uphold.

It’s even easier than she expected – turns out you don’t need to craft a reputation when others have crafted one for you.

Her peers generally ignore her, and when teachers single her out she acts as if it doesn’t faze her, even when the rest of the class rolls their eyes. They see her as the reclusive, pretentious genius, the snooty rich kid with an ego the size of the state of Massachusetts. No one would possibly think that she cries herself to sleep sometimes, and that’s exactly how she likes it.

By the time she’s thirteen and the end of eighth grade rolls around, she’s rather infamous: Lena Luthor, the girl no one dares to cross. Straight A student, first with the answer in every class, witty retort or icy silence for anyone who dares to approach her. She spends her free time studying in her dorm and practicing witty comebacks in front of the mirror. She writes to Lex a few times, but he almost never responds, and when he does it’s a brief note on monogrammed stationery.

Lillian, though she’d never admit it, is quietly impressed when Lena comes home to California the summer before high school. She’s changed, she knows. She’s matured. A part of her is childishly happy when her mother smiles in pride at Lena’s posture and impeccable politeness.

But Lillian’s prouder when she receives the news: Lex is returning to Metropolis, just out of college, to take over LuthorCorp at 22. Lionel is stepping down, his health getting worse each day, and his son is the only heir to the throne.

While Lena feels pride for her brother, she can’t help but worry. Lex has been worse lately, his episodes coming once or twice a week instead of every year. But Lionel trusts him, so she does too. 

Sometimes, that trust feels unfounded, like when he puts a device on the market that’s quite obviously shoddily produced or when he partners with creepy Maxwell Lord (he’s what Lionel calls “fresh money,” Lillian calls “a troubled young man,” and what Lena calls “an arrogant, pompous man-child”) to build a super strong kind of concrete that can withstand earthquakes (all the tests fail and they never speak of it again; the media has a field day).

Ninth grade starts off, and Lena feels more confident, if not happy. She takes the most advanced classes offered and is rarely ever seen outside of the classroom. Now that she’s in high school, parties abound, but she never attends a single one. Her fourteenth birthday passes without acknowledgement from anyone, and that night she puts on her old favorite flannel and tries to remember the times with Lucy, when she felt so much happier and much less alone.

It's what Lillian wanted, she thinks when those traitorous thoughts enter her mind. She hears it every time she even mentions someone from school at home: _Luthors are solitary creatures. Be your own person, Lena. You don’t need others to work beside you when you are powerful enough on your own._

Lena sees it in Lex every day. He calls her, when he has the time, but he’s not the man he used to be. He shaved his head and started wearing the same black suit with a green tie every day, so he wouldn’t have to think about dressing in the morning. He doesn’t tell jokes anymore, and his smiles are few and far between. His research at LuthorCorp takes up all of his time.

Lena has to admit, she gets scared of him, as he rants on video call about the increasing pro-alien sentiment in the public. More and more aliens are coming out, Superman is still protecting in Metropolis, and recently, a series of unconnected attacks from not-so-friendly aliens have only strengthened Lex’s opinions that they do not belong on Earth.

Lena could care less, to be entirely honest. No person, alien or not, deserves to be taken or evicted from their home, and if Earth is where they find refuge, then so be it. She’s not about to go making out with aliens any time soon, but she doesn’t mind their presence, and she has to admit, Superman is doing good work.

(Even though it’s painfully obvious Clark Kent, unassuming reporter, business partner, and close friend of her brother’s, is hiding some steel under that Kansas wheat. She doesn’t tell Lex. She’s afraid of what might happen if she did.)

Tenth grade begins, and Lena grows ever the more worried. Lex, living and working in Metropolis, had started running into some shady things. Dabbling in weapons markets, associating with anti-alien hate groups, the kind of things that are decidedly bad for business, if Lena’s countless nights listening to Lionel talk shop are to be believed.

Lex doesn’t seem to care about any of it, instead pushing harder on his increasingly public regime. He surrounds himself with terrible people, and there are whispers he’s gearing up for something big.

Mid-October, he gives Lena a call.

“Hey, kiddo. How’s school?” He’s restless, ever-shifting, an unstable grin on his face. He runs a hand over his bald head, a habit from childhood, and fidgets his fingers, something he hasn't done since stressful chess matches in middle school. He’s nervous, about what, Lena hardly wants to guess.

Lena is eating a late dinner and doing her advanced biophysics homework. “School’s fine, Lex. It’s late here. Are you okay?”

This is how it’s been, between them, lately. Cold, impersonal conversation, Lena always scared to make the wrong move. She’s heard what he’s been like, not the brother she knows. She doesn’t want to set him off.

“Fine, I’m fine. I’ve just received some... disturbing news from my officers at the BioTrax office.” Lena winces at the name. BioTrax, a subdivision Lex has been experimenting with, specializes in hunting and “detaining” aliens. (And Lex calling his employees “officers” is just downright creepy.) “Did you know that Clark Kent, my best friend, my best friend whom I thought was from _Kansas_, is really Superman, killer of man and last son of Krypton?” When Lena stays silent, biting her tongue, gauging his anger (pretty high; this isn’t gonna end well), he sighs. “Of course you did. You were always smarter than me.” When he chuckles, she can hear the desperation, the maniacal hint of insanity in his voice, the way he cackles like that deranged madman in Gotham. She has to admit, she’s terrified.

She sets her homework aside. After a long moment, she says, “yes, I knew.”

Lex chuckles again. “He has to pay. He- he has to pay, there’s no way around it, kiddo. He has to- You understand that, right?” He asks, sobering abruptly. “He has to pay for lying to me. He has to pay for all that he’s done.”

Lena’s eyes widen. _He can’t be serious._

“Lex, that’s-”

He hangs up.

Two days later, Superman is put in critical condition by Lex Luthor in a battle that takes out half of downtown Metropolis and kills 1,500 people. That’s more people than Lena’s even met in her life.

_1,500 people._

“And breaking news, billionaire CEO Lex Luthor went mad today in a terrorist attack that will change Metropolis’ and possibly the United States’, history forever.”

She breaks down that night, in her dorm room, but silently. Weeps soundless tears for the brother that was, the man who helped her learn robotics and took care of her when she was sick and loved, loved, _loved_, loved with his whole heart, loved _her_, who was so, so gone. She had the power to stop it, to the see the signs and pull him back from the edge. If only she had been a better sister, a better friend. If only she had been better.

One night, and then she’s done. No more mourning. He had brought this on himself.

Lex destroyed billions of dollars of property, all wearing a giant flying exosuit and _oh_, she realizes as she watches the news, it’s the one she and him talked about that winter in Dublin, one that was going to be a hero, a childhood dream brought to life as a nightmare.

The cops take him easily; it’s like he wants to be found. Lena tries her hardest not to cry when she watches the footage of the trial online.

(She thinks of their last conversation. _He has to pay for lying to me. He has to pay for all that he’s done._

It was as good as an admission, and she wonders as if it’s a crime not to testify, to keep quiet about her knowledge of what he would do. She pushes it down, down, down, into boxes she locks in dusty closets and does her best to forget.)

Neither of her parents are in attendance, either, and Lex is all alone up there. It makes her sad before she remembers the 1,500 sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers and friends who are alone forever in whatever hell awaits them after death, and then she’s crying all over again.

She doesn’t let anyone see. The trial happens in early December (skipped her birthday, doesn’t matter, nothing matters), over a weekend, and by Monday, she’s back to stone-cold Luthor.  
  
Trouble is, it’s not a façade anymore. Not an act she can play.

The other students avoid her like the plague, afraid she carries remnants of the madness that ate apart at Lex. They keep a wide berth, mutter under their breath as she passes, glare at her in the dining hall.

She pretends it doesn’t bother her, but it does. The way she’s dropped straight into her brother’s shadow by those who have never met him. The way the worst thing he’s ever done is somehow her fault.

It doesn’t make sense to her, but it’s still the way it is.

Lena’s ostracized even more than before, so when she makes a spontaneous decision to buy herself a plane ticket to Dublin for the holidays, she doesn’t bother to tell anyone. She knows Lillian will be beside herself, but frankly, she can’t bring herself to care.

She stays at the same hotel they stayed at when she was little. Dublin is much the same as it was, but most disappointingly, it seems she still cannot escape Lex’s terrible deeds. Everywhere she goes, people watch her, stare at her, wonder about her. It’s awful, the first few days, when she starts to feel like she’ll never belong anywhere again.

On Christmas Eve, alone in her hotel room, she has her first panic attack, or at least the first one she recognizes. She’s fourteen years old, alone in a foreign country, hated by general society because of a genocide she didn’t commit, and she has no one to turn to that will take care of her. All she can think is _if only I could have saved him. My fault, my fault, my fault._ She craves a hug like nothing else. She breaks inside.

She collapses and can’t get up, can’t stop herself from crying. She spends about an hour dragging herself into bed, only to rip her clothes off and lie there, in her underwear, unable to breathe. She feels like she’s about to die. She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but she dreams of blood and shining green metals and screaming and pain.

In the morning, she lets herself stay in bed until noon, then makes an appointment with a physician in Boston for when she gets home and starts finishing up a research project for school.  
  
She’s a Luthor, and Luthors don’t show weakness. Not even to themselves.

Lillian doesn’t get mad about her trip to Ireland, but she knows better than to tell her about the doctor (see above: weakness is to be punished, and Lena has enough welts on her back from where she tried to claw at it that night). Over the rest of the school year, she attends a therapist once a week, and by June he’s prescribing her anxiety medication and gently suggesting she doesn’t need him anymore. He says it’s because she’s getting better, but she knows it’s because he’s nervous around another mentally unstable Luthor (it’s ironic she ended up like this, so pitifully ironic).

By her sixteenth birthday in eleventh grade, LuthorCorp is stable under the leadership of the former VP of the board, her meds are working perfectly, and her studies are back on track. It seems like things will get back to normal.

Except they don’t, because Veronica Sinclair transfers to Lena’s school, and everything changes.

Veronica Sinclair is dangerous, daring, and a terrible influence. She’s the only one with a reputation as bad as Lena’s (although all of her own volition) and she doesn’t seem to care one bit. She parties hard, drinks harder, and despite a clear wealth of intelligence stays behind in most her classes.

But she’s gorgeous, and dry, and she keeps winking at Lena across classrooms, so that’s how she finds herself at a party in someone else’s dorm on a Saturday night, her first party of high school.

Veronica is there, queen of everything and she couldn’t care less. She spots Lena the second she arrives. She sticks out, in her dress pants and low-cut blue tank top, so different from the ripped jeans and cropped band tee shirts of her peers (it’s meant to be casual but it looks so forced when she knows so many of them are Fortune 500 company heirs like herself).

But fancy clothes and high ponies and perfect makeup are how she hides the anxiety and the stress and the mess that is her life, so she sticks to what she knows. And Veronica seems to like it.

She’s surprised, a bit incredulous, but the other girl, who asks her to call her Roulette, dances with her all night. By the end of it, her and Lena are making out in the bathroom, and Lena’s not sure how it happened, but she likes it, a lot.

She wonders how she went from kissing her best friend near the radiator during homework club to essentially biting the neck of an endlessly sexy girl at a high school party, but she doesn’t care much.

It isn’t until she’s back at her dorm, lips terribly bruised and clothes rumpled, that she realizes what this means.

She’s gay.

She sits down on her be, thinks it through. It’s like a science problem, really; hypothesis: she’s a lesbian. Evidence: she certainly enjoyed kissing Veronica, has never had feelings for a man before, and now that she thinks about it, she’s pretty sure she had a crush on Lucy when they were friends. Experiment: well, the kissing probably counts. Conclusion: she’s gay as hell.

She feels alright about it, all things considered. It hasn’t brought on an anxiety attack so far, which is a good thing, but she starts to feel the now-familiar racing of her heart when she thinks about telling Lillian. 

That will be a nightmare.

But it’s November, and she’s not planning on going home for the holidays, so she has plenty of time.

Meanwhile, she starts attending more parties. The second she gets there, Veronica tugs her into a dark room, and they kiss until one of them breaks it off, what feels like hours later.

Both stay behind for Christmas break, and Lena ends up having sex with Roulette on the couch in the dorm common room. All in all, it’s a pretty terrible way to lose your virginity, but damn it if she doesn’t enjoy it all the same.

It’s also over Christmas break that Lena discovers she loves drinking. Immensely. She craves the way it feels when she’s buzzed, the way everything starts to slip away, and she loves how mature it makes her, able to handle a few drinks even when she’s always the youngest one in the room.

She tries not to get too drunk all that often, because she gathers enough attention as it is and that would be hard to write off, but she still enjoys stumbling back to her room late at night, high and giggly.

Veronica gets kicked out at the end of the year, having caused too many problems and failed most of her classes, and she leaves Lena with a last night to remember. It’s a mutual parting, and Lena doesn’t regret anything when she tells her she loves her as she gets in her father’s car to drive away.

Veronica doesn’t say it back, but Lena doesn’t expect her to. No one has said they loved her in a long time. She’s forgotten how it sounds. 

She goes back to her dorm, thinks about nothing on her bed for a little while, not really crying but almost. She changes in pajamas, reads a little bit, and goes to sleep.

Lex breaks out of prison that night.

Lena has her first panic attack in a while. She thought she was safe, thought he was gone, thought it would all be over, but it’s not.

She doesn’t know why she’s scared. It feels like... she can’t even put it into words; she’s feeling too much at once. Fear he’ll come for her, to kill her or hug her, she doesn’t even know. She’s scared for all the other people he might hurt, even goddamn _Superman_, and she’s so _angry_ at him, and _god_, she wishes, not for the first time, that she had died that day with her _máthair_, followed her into the lake and slipped into that everlasting cool, that the Luthors had never found her at all.

Lex goes to Luthor Manor in Metropolis first. Lionel’s away on business. Lillian, inexplicably, remains unharmed.

(Pretty explicably, if you ask Lena, but she can’t say anything, not when Lillian controls her with only a single look. She’s afraid, she’s loath to admit, but she’s spent her whole _life_ being afraid. It’s nothing new.)

He kills Margarita.

(She’s lost two mothers now.

It’s a really lovely funeral.)

She spends a harrowing week, as school winds down, locked in her dorm so no one looks at her, whispers around her, speculates whether she helped or not. As soon as the authorities catch him, she’s on the first plane back to California, ready to testify at his next hearing.

She’s only sixteen, but the jury listens to her anyway, and she’s proven innocent of helping. So is Lillian, though Lena knows, beyond a doubt, that it was her. Lex is still her golden boy who can do no wrong, and Lena, Lena is the orphan, the adopted half-blood idiot who could never compare. Lillian is blinded by the shine of Lex’s stupid bald head. Still, home is better than anywhere else. She dreads returning to school, to the ally-less prison that awaits her on the East Coast.

For the two months she stays in California, she avoids media attention as much as possible. Lionel offers her an internship at one of his R&D labs, and she takes it, thankful for the distraction. She’s the youngest person working there, but everyone else is too scared of her to bother her, and it’s clear within minutes she’s the smartest one in the department, leaving her to pick up on most of the work (she doesn’t mind; it gives her racing mind something to do when _he_ gets so stuck in the synapses that memories of him feel like wads of gum).

On her last night at the Manor (rebuilt, no trace of Lex left), she comes out to her parents. She’d had a little bit of wine ahead of time, and she’d been tipsy all through dinner, so when she does it, she’s not completely thinking.

Needless to say, the Luthors are not pleased.

Lillian is disturbed, muttering “how could you” under her breath every other second, and Lionel is angry, demanding to know why she’d make such a horrible choice. Lena falls silent, knowing she can’t defend herself. You can’t fight a Luthor, and it would be stupid to try to battle such prejudice as this, so she gets herself on the next plane to Boston and fights down tears at the airport.

Senior year passes much like she thought it would. She graduates with high honors, and almost doesn’t attend the ceremony, but it’s pointless to try and avoid it when she’s leaving anyway. She has a distinct feeling she’s not wanted back in California for the summer, so at seventeen she uses the small portion of the Luthor fortune she still has access to and purchases an apartment in Cambridge, near the MIT campus where she’ll be attending university.

After her experience in her father’s labs, she knows engineering and science are where her heart lies, so she went for the topmost college that she could get. She counted herself lucky they didn’t cast her out for her surname.

Lena learns an important fact about college girls: as long as she’s witty, brazen, and attractive, they would be all over her, Luthor or not. She doesn’t let herself get close to any of them, but it provides her with enough one-night stands to keep herself satisfied. She never wanted to be one of those people to shag and run, but when she’s sneaking out of dorm rooms at two in the morning and buying walk-of-shame coffee from the Starbucks on campus, she’s only resigning herself to her fate. People don’t fall in love with Luthors, and Luthors don’t fall in love with people. _Keep to yourself and focus on your studies_, says a voice that sounds less like Lillian and more like her every day.

She spends more time than she’d like to admit getting drunk in the clubs the other undergrads frequent just off campus. She balances the nights and the days well, never taking more classes than she can handle, remembering her meds and avoiding them when drunk or hungover, and studying for every test.

Thankfully, the work is almost easy, and that leaves much of her time free for getting spectacularly smashed.

Lena counts herself lucky that the area in which she lives does not frown upon underage drinking. Being three years too young to even be near a bottle of scotch, she keeps her borderline alcoholic tendencies on the down low, but every once in a while, she enjoys a long night at the bar, sipping whiskey and coke and fending off potential (male) suitors (she never goes to lesbian bars, too afraid of the bad press and Lillian’s particular form of punishment).

She goes home once the whole year, in March, for an event that Lillian says she “simply must attend, it would be unseemly not to.”

It’s a ridiculous costume gala, Victorian era theme, and Lena is forced into a tight corset (real of course, Lillian pulled no punches) and a frilly white and red dress that would look better had her hair been blonde. As it is, she takes the sparkling ruby mask her mother hands her with a huff and spends the party hiding in the back of the room with a bottle of champagne and a book on astrophysics.

And then the bombs go off.

It turns out, later, to be a cheap party trick, set off by none other than Veronica Sinclair, the girl Lena had been hopelessly in love with back in high school. The rebel is back, and with a vengeance, all set to make a name for herself as a crime lord and backwoods alien goods – and the occasional actual aliens – trader. The name Roulette finally stuck.

As the smoke clears and party guests run for their lives, Lena stumbles upon Veronica near the back exit. Her dress is torn, her hair a mess, her palms sweaty and heart a hummingbird, and she knows Veronica can tell.

“Hello, darling,” she smiles, oddly not unkindly, and Lena has a panic attack.

She couldn’t say, later, what started it. Maybe it was that she hadn’t taken her meds that morning, anticipating that she’d be drinking later, or maybe it was the stress of the bombs. Maybe it was simply seeing Veronica again.

But if she was still working with a therapist, they would say that it was a lot deeper than that. And Lena, in her heart of hearts, in the recesses of the maze of locked boxes that make up her mind, knows what the cause truly is.

It’s the cold, impersonal way Veronica addressees her, the ice in her tone. Or really, it’s the lack of warmth, the lack of history and love that had used to be there.

Lena remembers curly hair and dimpled smiles, a sweet boy who had wanted to make her happy, who had said her name with mirth and joy, who liked to make her laugh, who went batshit crazy and left her all alone, just like Veronica.

And at that moment, she can only see _him_ in her eyes.

(Another one she couldn’t save.)

Lex is the cause of every fear, every damned trigger she still has left, that she hasn’t beaten out of herself like a rug. It all leads back to him in the end.

She can’t remember what happened to Veronica, but when Lillian finds her, she’s curled on the ground like a child, trembling, shaking, crying.

She still has the scar where a piece of cold glass scraped her wrist after she fell, although the bruise on her cheek faded after a day or so.

She spends the next week locked in her old bedroom, doing her classwork online and begging, each day, for a plane ticket back to Boston, something to get her away from the stifling silence of Luthor Manor.

Lionel never lets up. She needs help, she’s sick, and until she gets better, she’s stuck there.

(It hurts a little; she thought he was on her side. She thought he was a good man, someone who stood up for her, but when it came down to it, he was just as bad as the rest of them.)

At the end of the week, Lena packs her things, steals the keys to one of the cars (the red 66 Thunderbird that always made her think of that movie with Susan Sarandon), and drives the 3,000 miles back to her apartment, not quite home but close.

(She had no home, not anymore. Home was serving thirty-two consecutive life sentences at a secure containment facility in Arizona.)

Lillian never calls. Lionel texts, to ask which car she had taken. She responds with a few simple words. He never writes back. She assumes it’s the last she’ll hear from her adopted parents.

If the recent estrangement from the Luthors did anything, it forced her to focus on schoolwork, and she’s finishing her bachelor’s in biochemical engineering by the end of sophomore year (and she’s not even twenty yet).

Because Lena’s an overachiever, she starts on her master’s in civil and environmental engineering right away. There, she meets Jack Spheer.

He’s charming, British (reminds her of home, Ireland-home, not Metropolis-home), and when he looks at her, he doesn’t see a Luthor. Together, they spend hours working on plans for their very own startup in the expansive labs at MIT, inventing the kind of nanotechnology Lex had struggled to make work back in his early years. With Jack’s precise building technique and Lena’s superior coding, the project is close to done by the time _it_ happens.

Jack asks her out, and she turns him down. It’s a bit obvious to her; she’s gay, and he’s more of a colleague, a friend, than a lover.

But Jack is taken by surprise. So much surprise, it seems, that he gets angry and sets fire to the lab (on accident. It’s not so accidental).

There’s an inquiry, and while they’re both absolved of blame, Lena still feels responsible. _She_ hurt him, caused him to go crazy, just like Lex. He was another one she couldn’t save, her _máthair_ and Lex and the 1,500 and Margarita and now her best friend, her _only_ friend in such a long time.

But there is no time to dwell on mistakes. Jack transfers, she wallows, and then she works on her master’s. She’s well on her way by the end of the year. With nothing better to do than wile away hours in her labs, she finds herself rising in the ranks of her classes, and she doesn’t have a single grade below a 98 by the beginning of the next year.

At twenty years old, ostracized from general society for a crime she didn’t commit, with almost two degrees already under her belt and a general distaste for social, too big of a taste for drinking, and a reputation for being a heartbreaker (it’s always her fault) it’s no wonder she finds herself friendless.

At least until Sam Arias stumbles along. Sam Arias, with her bright smile and casual good looks and beautiful brain and young daughter Ruby, born when Sam was sixteen, a mistake but one the young woman would never take back.

Sam is sweet and sort of childish and smart and funny and she captivates Lena’s attention like no one ever has. She’s in the Business and Finance elective Lena’s only taking to appease Lillian (it hasn’t been as radio silent as she thought, but at least she’s been written back into the will), and she’s charming to the teacher and the students alike, and Lena can’t deny the tiny crush she has on the woman.

It seems Sam feels the same way, because one morning, the confident brunette walks up and asks Lena out.

The next few months pass in the sort of blissful happiness Lena never thought she’d get to experience. She has a beautiful, wonderful girlfriend, who reminds her to eat and stop working and stop drinking, but also laughs with her and dances with her late at night when they’re both too giddy to sleep, said beautiful girlfriend’s daughter loves her, which she never thought would be possible (she’s always scared children away), and everything seems too good to be true. Her master’s is halfway done with, and by the time Sam graduates at the end of the next year, Lena will be done too. 

She can’t remember enjoying life this much since she was little, talking with Lex over hot chocolate and smuggled cookies. Sam takes her on dates to nice restaurants and blushes when Lena pays, even though they both know she can barely afford for herself anyway. They have romantic picnics under the stars and take walks in the park, and sometimes Lena watches Ruby while Sam’s at class and she feels responsibility for something so _good_ for once it almost makes her cry. She’s happy, she’s safe, and then.

Then, of course, it all falls apart.

It was always bound to, really.

Mid-July, Lionel passes away, suddenly and unexpectedly. He hadn’t returned to run LuthorCorp after Lex, but the acting CEO had been subtlety following his direction, and now there is no real Luthor left at the helm.

It’s strange, how little feeling Lena has about the whole ordeal. Lionel had been a man to look up to, once, but just like Lex, his pedestal crumbled underneath him with the weight of his ego, and now he’s just another person who let Lena down.

She still has a few credits left on her masters, and Lena speeds through them, anxiously awaiting the day Lillian will call her back to Metropolis, fully dreading what she knows will happen, what she’s been unconsciously expecting since Lex went crazy. It comes near March, when Lena’s twenty-one, and Sam is twenty-three.

She spends her final night in Boston amongst messily packed boxes (real ones this time), with a bottle of wine and Sam in her arms for one last time. The excuse Lena gives, around bittersweet kisses and lingering tears, is that she doesn’t think long distance will work. They both know the truth: if Lena returns from this, she will not be the same, and it’s not fair to ask Sam to pick up the pieces when Lena finally breaks. Because if anything could shatter her so intricately, so perfectly, after Lex and everything that came with him, it would be the weight of the Luthor legacy, finally bringing her to her knees.

So Sam is gone, and Lena is alone again.

She returns to Metropolis and starts slow. A place on the board, alongside her mother. The men (emphasis on men) in charge are loath to bend to the will of the young, fresh-as-a-penny (read: female, openly gay, strong and confident in ways they will never be) Luthor, but enough prodding from Lillian has them begrudgingly giving in.

Lena never understands why she does it. It’s not like Lillian even likes her at this point, much less thinks she’s fit to run the company. But it is what it always was: six letters at the end of her name that pin her down to a reputation she doesn’t want, never asked for, a reputation Lillian isn’t willing to let fade into the background.

“LuthorCorp must be led by a Luthor, Lena. It is the only way.”

So, of course, when Lena is officially appointed CEO at the ripe age of twenty two in January of the next year, the first thing she proposes is a rebranding.

It would be full, and complete. The board, under her direction, has been pulling out of weapons markets slowly and unconstructively, but she’s recommending a full shutdown of any departments established by Lex in his mania years. She also lightly suggests moving headquarters and a name change.

(L-Corp, because that way any L-name can lead, and it does serve to make literal steam come out of her ears enough that Lillian starts to look like one of the aliens she hates so much.)  
  
“The name Luthor is feared in practically every household across America,” Lena tells the board. “If we want any profit at all from consumer sources, distancing ourselves from my brother is the best way to go. We want to lead a brighter future, not inspire terror in a young, impressionable population.”

And she controls their salaries, so the board votes yes. 

She decides to move the company to National City for a few reasons. One being her brother has never tried to kill anyone there, two being its beautiful views and the brand new office tower being built near the harbor, and three being the incoming population of scientists and med students from the well-known National City University and the powerful companies already present in the area: Lord Tech (dwindling but useful), Edge Enterprises, and Catco Worldwide Media.

(Four definitely not being the heroic Supergirl, last daughter of Krypton, National City’s own alien protector. Who is definitely a lesbian sex symbol. Lena’s not ashamed to admit it, she’s gay as hell and her resolve only goes so far.

The fact that a public alliance with Supergirl would do wonders for L-Corp’s reputation is also kind of nice.)

So August rolls around, Lena buys a penthouse, bids her fuming mother goodbye, and moves down to National City, prepared to rename her company, build a new, normal life, and maybe, finally, make some good in the world.

And then her seat on a commercial spacecraft (that she didn’t even book a ticket on, her PR team did it for her, the self-entitled bastards) blows up, and Lena remembers that her life will never be normal, not ever.

All in all, it’s a pretty terrible way to start her life in National City. Her second day in her new office, she’s bombarded by none other than Clark Kent (she tries not to wince when she sees him, alive and angry, tries not to curl up in herself and cancel the rest of her day. Luthors do not show weakness). He’s joined by an associate of his, Kara Danvers of the pastel sweaters and stammering sentences, who looks so purely _good_ that Lena thinks she might suffocate from it.

And yet there is something that drags her in about Kara, something that makes her want to lock the doors to her office (with Clark Kent outside, of course) and talk with her for hours, spill her whole miserable backstory, because, in the span of about ten minutes, Kara Danvers has made her feel _safe_.

It’s the way she says “yeah,” when Lena asks if they can understand wanting to make a name for themselves outside of their families, the way she speaks with such conviction that Lena thinks Kara knows _exactly_ what she means.

Kara returns later, to talk her out of the renaming ceremony, and while she’s kind, and has good intentions, this is what Lena’s been working towards for two years, what she’s spent ages planning, the one thing that will finally separate her from Lex’s name. And she must go through with it.

(She can never be separate from him, not really. He’s embedded in every part of her soul, forever and ever. He sees and hears and speaks through her, in everything she does, because he is her. He raised her, taught her. His ghost exists through her, and it’s not okay, but it’s that scrap of home that lingers in her heart, and it has to be okay anyway.)

The logo explodes halfway through her speech, and really, what was she expecting?

Everything erupts into chaos, and she finds the police officer that turns out to be not so civil, and before she knows anything she’s picking up the gun someone dropped and shooting him before he can strangle the woman he’s fighting.

It’s instinct, and later, when she’s drowning herself in scotch and paperwork, she will file a report saying it was self-defense. But it still feels dirty, broken, Luthor, and she takes several showers once she’s home, not just to wash the concrete dust out of her hair.

Kara Danvers and Clark Kent return to her office to give her the article they wrote, and she jokes, she teases, and it feels like she’s in control again (Maybe she teases Kara a little too much, but it’s simply so fun to see her blush).

That night, working late, spurred on by Kara Danvers and her goodness, Lena makes a decision.

She can do this. She _will_ do this. She will take this company, this legacy, all her dreams and mindless fantasies, and turn them into reality. She will become someone she can be proud of. She can become the person Lex had taught her to be, before he forsook their entire relationship and everything he had stood for.

She can cover up the pain. It’s not that hard, she’s been doing it for years. And maybe, one day, if she works hard enough, there won’t be pain to cover up.

(Yeah, right, but she’s being optimistic. Or she’s really drunk.)

Just as she has begun this new life of positivity and goal setting, Kara Danvers returns to her office for a piece on the President’s Alien Amnesty Act and L-Corp’s (more accurately, Lena’s) position on it.

She deflects, shows Kara a new prototype she’s working on instead, because her answer is too complicated.

How does she explain that she holds no ill will towards aliens, but is wary nonetheless? How does she clarify that she fights for equality, but the only alien she really even knows is her assistant Jess’ brother in law? How does she hope to make the public, Kara, _everyone_ understand that no matter how hard she tries, she was raised by the Luthors, and nurture is always, _always_ what shapes you?

Except she ends up in an (incredibly well-worded) argument with Kara about aliens anyway. Her prototype, an alien detection device meant to tell off-worlder from human, strikes some unforeseen chord in the cheerful woman, and in the midst of their verbal spar, Lena says things she regrets. She always let her language get the best of her, aiming more for a well-placed barb, a put together, catchy, scalding statement, than the truth or her real thoughts. It got her in trouble often with Lillian, and it seems it will now, because once Lena says “it’s also always been a country of humans,” Kara’s smile is a little more tight-lipped.

(She makes Kara try the device, but when she checks it later, the wires are fried in what looks like a shoddy attempt at sabotage. She makes a note to check up on that later, but never does. She tells herself it’s because she forgets, but really, she just trusts Kara, for some implicit reason she can’t name.)

She expects a scathing article, to lose the one person she’d been hoping to gain as a friend, but when Kara drops by to show it to her, it’s much more mildly worded than she could have ever been hoping for.

They talk, and it’s nice, and Lena thinks that maybe, maybe she can have this. This one friend, who can just be her _friend_, without having to go and make things complicated.  
  
And then things get complicated.

Kara shows up in her office late a few nights later, in a rush, put together but clearly out of breath, asking about the whereabouts of one Veronica Sinclair.

And Lena plays it off, tries to dismiss Veronica as one of those girls at school she didn’t speak to, downplays their history. She writes down the address of Veronica’s latest fight club and sends Kara on her way, hoping she was of some use.

The second the blonde reporter is gone, Lena takes the opportunity to get very, very, drunk.

It’s not like she’d forgotten Veronica existed. Hell, she got the invitations every month. Her very public panic attack freshman year of college was still fresh on her mind. But when Veronica only existed in calligraphic words and alerts on her phone, there was a way to pretend she had never existed at all, like her first heartbreak, her first betrayal, another Lex she didn’t know to save, like all of it was some horrible fever dream.

With Veronica so close, touching the lives of Kara’s friends, hurting them, and, by extension, her, it was so much harder to forget.

But Lena drank, and drinking helped a bit with that.

Jess called a cab at one in the morning and made her go home, and when she woke up, she was greeted with her phone alarm, reminding her of her plan: be the person you are proud to be. (She didn’t care if it was cheesy, she could do what she wanted.)

She would not weep over Veronica Sinclair, over teenage heartbreak. Lena Luthor does not weep. Lena Luthor does not bend.

Lena Luthor is strong. _You are strong._

So she gets up, and she puts on her armor (clothes, makeup, hair, looks to kill, it’s her only safety net), and she goes to work.

Lena soon finds out that when you move to Supergirl’s city, you get a shitload of crime with your fries, and when not a week after an alien fight club is shut down human robbers start using alien weapons, she is pretty beyond being surprised.

All of this is happening around the same time as the benefit gala for the Luthor Children’s Hospital, one of the many buildings Lena’s name is plastered on in this city (it makes her uncomfortable, a bit, but such is the life of a Luthor). And Lena, as a young pseudo-genius, decides to kill two birds with one stone and makes a plan.

Truthfully, it’s three birds, because she has a theory to prove and she’s going to do it.

So Lena, being a well-meaning but often reckless scientist, creates an experiment and executes her plan with perfect accuracy. She invites Kara Danvers along as her date, both because the adorable blonde is truly lovely, and she very much wants to spend more time with her, but also because if things go south, she would like to have at least one person in her corner.  
  
(So bright is the light of Kara’s smile that she hardly notices when the fratboy Mike-of-the-interns invites himself along.)

The second part of her plan includes reaching out, through Kara, to Supergirl, and inviting her to the gala as well. Once again, if anything goes wrong, she would like someone there to stand up for her, and with only a conversation with the young superhero, Lena knows she can trust her. Plus, just in case, it will be nice to have some extra protection.

The third part of her plan includes many late nights in her lab, but when her black-body radiation generator works perfectly and catches the thieves at the gala, she thinks that it’s been worth it.

After the benefit, it feels like everything is finally, finally falling into place. Stocks are up, work is going swimmingly, the doctorate she started by correspondence is nearing completion (Dr. Lena Kieran Luthor, here we come), Supergirl is knocking alien threats off left and right, and Kara Danvers is an ever-increasing presence in her life.

One brunch when they were both free turns into a dinner date turns into movie night, and over the next month and a half, Kara becomes pretty much her only friend. She finds herself texting and calling her when she has a free moment, and Kara even talks her into getting a Snapchat account so they can make use of the ridiculous filters.

Kara Danvers makes her feel light and feathery, free and happy, the way Sam used to make her feel. Kara is sunshine personified, cheery and endlessly optimistic, and it’s such a contradiction to Lena’s darkness that she feels a literal weight leave her chest, not to mention the responsibilities and stress and anxiety drifting from her shoulders. With Kara, Lena can simply be _Lena_, and it’s such a good, new feeling that she never wants to let it go.

Lena isn’t going to hurt Kara, she thinks before she goes to bed every night. Kara will not end up like Lex or Veronica or Jack. Kara is good, and she will stay that way, and maybe Lena can have someone good in her life without poisoning it.

Her mother seems intent to prove her wrong.

Lillian has been gone for too long, radio silent while Lena does as she wishes with the company. In fact, she hasn’t heard from her since that January (it’s late November, she’s set a new no-contact record), when Lena was appointed CEO and basically wrote Lillian out from L-Corp entirely.

(The pleasant surprise was that this birthday, her twenty-third, Kara showed up at her office with Thai food and a Star Wars marathon, and Lena felt appreciated for the first time in a long time.)

Now that her mother is back, Lena is scared. Scared for herself, for the city, for Supergirl, for Kara, for L-Corp, for a lot of things.

And scared she should be, because Lillian is the leader of Cadmus (of course) and she’s gearing up for something _big_ and she wants, _needs_ Lena’s help.

She needs Lena's help.

It’s everything she’s wanted and feared for so many years, her mother begging her for something, the power finally resting in her hands. It feels remarkably bittersweet now, with her new life, one she finally feels comfortable in, to be needed. Through the lens of this new life, she can see her mother clearly, and she knows praise is never going to come from Lillian Luthor. She will never belong, and she will never be what her mother wants.

But she’s a Luthor, and a damn smart one at that, so she uses it to her advantage, and she plays them all.

Pretends she’s the bad girl. Turns Supergirl against her (her heart doesn’t ache, _it doesn’t_), makes her mother believe her, tampers with that critical isotope, and, when the time comes, pulls the whole scheme off without a hitch.

Lillian is taken in, brought back to jail, to rot where she belongs, and she saved the day, with only a few marks against her in the federal books and a secure city under her belt.  
  
The worst part is, she doesn’t feel like she saved anything at all.

The emotion that rocked her, the wetness in her voice as she said “I’m a Luthor,” and turned the key, all of that was real.

She _was_ a Luthor. Because when it came down to it, she was willing to betray everyone to save the world, and that was a sacrifice a hero just wouldn’t make.

Lena has a minor panic attack once she’s home and three drinks deep that night, rocking, face buried in her knees, on her kitchen floor, covered in tears and spilled wine. She knows she’s as bad as they say, knows that she’ll never truly escape her upbringing, and that fact hits her like a ton of rocks.

On top of that, she’s also proved her theory: Kara Danvers is Supergirl.

It’s painfully obvious sometimes, the way Supergirl will clear her throat or Kara will straighten her back and shoulders when defending her point. The little slipups (buses don’t fly, Kara, you sweet, oblivious alien), and really, do the glasses help anything?

But above all, it’s the way that Kara was willing to believe her, even when all the evidence pointed to the opposite. The way she insisted she was not like her family. Her conviction never wavering. The way Supergirl defended her in the way Kara only ever had, the unfailing faith she had in her best friend.

(Of course there would only ever really be one person that trusted Lena. It was all she really deserved.)

So Lena isn’t scared, not at first, when Detective Sawyer comes to arrest her for a crime she didn’t commit. After all, Kara is there, and she has made it more than clear that she believes in Lena no matter what.

(Lena finds out, much later, that there was a moment, there on the pier, when Lena was going to launch the virus into the air, where that belief faltered, the trust shattered just a little. Kara told her she was a really good actress. Lena’s heart wilted but stayed upright. She was a Luthor. _Luthors do not wilt._)

And of course, it comes so soon after everything she thought she knew gets torn into pieces, broken down and ruined in the space of ten minutes. She is not Lena Kieran Luthor, adopted heiress to the Luthor fortune.

She is Lena Kieran Luthor, Lionel Luthor’s youngest daughter, a Luthor by blood and all the rest.

It hurts, a sting deep in her chest. Not because they lied, because they always lied, and she found out long ago that Lionel did not deserve the pedestal she held him upon.

It hurts because there was no escaping them now, not when their (his) blood ran red in her veins.

Did a villain’s blood drip black? She wanted to cut herself open and see, see for herself the proof that she was just like them. That she had always been, and always will be, just like them. 

Him. Always like him.

(At least Lillian was not her mother. That would have been cruel.)

It’s funny: her whole life, Lena strived for control. She thought, as an orphan, her parentage was the one thing that would forever be only _hers_, but she was wrong even about that. She was a floundering mess under everyone else’s thumb after all, a peasant serving under a queen.

So Lena goes to jail, and it hurts, but not as deep as everything else, as the blood and the people and the weight. She’s pretty sure she can’t feel more pain at this point.

She would be wrong.

Lillian breaks her out, and she tries to use her, and there’s a cyborg man and a Luthor vault and then Supergirl is there, and Lillian is hurting her, and all Lena can think is don’t hurt her because Kara is beautiful, so beautiful, and _god_, they haven’t even talked about it yet, and they need to, because Kara can’t die like this, protecting a woman who is the farthest thing from deserving of her.

But Kara doesn’t die. Kara escapes, and saves her, and then Kara brings her flowers and happiness all while pretending that she wasn’t there.

And that’s when the first tendrils of sadness start to creep back into Lena’s heart.

It’s the new year by the time Lena feels even a little bit of the lightness from the previous fall, even a scrap of the joy Kara gave her. They still do lunch, and even though Lena feels her heart grow heavy every time Kara leaves early with a halfhearted excuse to stop some fire or robbery, she knows that it’s for the best. It’s to keep everyone safe.

(She doesn’t even entertain the idea that it’s not because she’s a Luthor. It will always be because she’s a Luthor.)

Her life becomes a comedy of sorts. Almost die, get saved by Supergirl, brunch with Kara, drink and cry, rinse and repeat. Even interruptions feel like part of the routine.

Until Jack comes back.

He’s there to launch the nanobot technology that _they_ created, in that lab at MIT, on those late nights she thought were built in friendship and he thought were built in something else.

It hurts, when she gets the email that she has two seats reserved at the presentation form Jess. It hurts, because she had loved him the only way she could, and it wasn’t enough for him.

(She couldn’t love Veronica enough. She couldn’t love Lex enough. Hell, she couldn’t even love Kara enough, because that sadness still weighed heavy whenever she saw her. Maybe there was something wrong with her. Maybe she couldn’t love.

Maybe she was just a Luthor after all, no matter how much she fought it.)

Jack returned, and even when she brought Kara with her, Jack still tried again, and again, and again. He wanted partnerships with L-Corp, which she was happy to give him, but he wanted something else, too, something she simply couldn’t give no matter how hard she tried. She just wasn’t built that way. Goddammit, even her sexuality was out of her control.

And then, because of course, Jack is being controlled by his evil secretary and his evil nanobots (the ones Lena coded, _it’s her fault_) and there’s a fight that Lena can barely remember half of because everything feels blurry about those months, those months when everything was going wrong.

She has to kill him. She has to kill Jack, who she loves, who saved her in a lot of ways even if they weren’t the ways he wanted. He dies in her arms, in a warehouse in the dead of night.

He dies and here’s the kicker: Lena doesn’t feel a thing.

She remembers crying, crying while Supergirl flew her home and laid her in bed (Kara took care of her, it’s how she likes to remember it), but the next morning, just... nothing. Nothing but a lick of flame when she thinks of Beth Breen rotting in prison.

It scares her, this emptiness. It feels like the most Luthor she’s ever been, cold and unfeeling. It reminds her of her mother, her lack of love, of softness, and it scares her so, so much.

She tells Kara, because she can always tell Kara.

_I think when I feel things again, I’m going to be very afraid. About the person I might be._

And Kara hugs her, holds her, whispers sweet nothings in her ear.

She is not Supergirl in that moment. She is just Kara Danvers, taking care of her best friend, all warmth and solid guardian and _oh_, just like that, Lena loves her.

Really, truly, loves her, the way she had loved Veronica, the way she had loved Sam, the way Jack wanted her to love him.

She loves her like lazy Sunday mornings and hot coffee on weekdays. She loves her like brunches on the Catco terrace and late nights on her couch, drinking wine. She loves her like scars over eyebrows and uneven smiles and all those little imperfections. She loves her like fire and truth and a deep, deep longing that’s been a part of her for so long she doesn’t know how to live without it anymore. She loves her like stars and sun and sky. She can’t feel any other way.

And that just makes it hurt more.

Lena needs a distraction. Oddly enough, one comes rather quickly, in the form of a generous, wise woman named Rhea, who wants her help building a transmatter portal.

The science of it is exquisite, intricate and detailed, the kind of experiment Lena has been craving since she wrapped up her doctorate. And Rhea is warm, and kind, and some long-ignored part of her, the part that craves a mother’s loving embrace, that seeks praise like her lungs seek air, the part that she normally keeps buried deep under the surface, comes to life in her presence.

Rhea is simply full of praise, and loving words, the kind of compliments Lena’s never heard before in her life. It’s too good to believe. It really is, because Rhea is not Rhea, Rhea is an alien, displaced from her home, and she has betrayed her, and Lena plans to shut down the experiment.

Except, the more Lena thinks on it, she realizes that really, this could be it. This could be her chance to finally, _finally_ do some good, to prove that L-Corp is not the company it once was, to help aliens the only way she knows how: science.

So she continues, because really, how could she not? This, _this_, deep down, is really what she craves. Not the praise, not the recognition and the affection, but the knowledge that she, Lena Luthor, did something good and purposeful with her life. That she made a real difference.

It’s a blur, the experiment, the fight, the betrayal and the pain so common she barely feels it anymore, and then she’s waking up on an alien ship in an expensive dress and she’s engaged to her best friend’s boyfriend, and all of a sudden the sadness and fear and despair and hatred for herself is back, seeping into every nerve in her body like cold water dripping down her back. It gathers at the base of her brain, in her stomach, along her fingers and arms. It coats every inch of her body, this self-loathing.

There is nothing she can do, now. She has brought this on herself (her fault her fault her fault), and she must sit back and watch as her whole life, her whole world is destroyed.

At least Mike (Mon-El, she has to remember) isn’t half bad looking. If she were into men. Unfortunately, she’s not.

Everything feels hopeless as she is shoved into that red dress (there is no modesty in Daxamite culture, it seems) and primped and preened and stared at and led down a hallway towards her metaphorical gallows, at least until Cat Grant somehow hacks the ship and broadcasts an (admittedly, awesome) angry message to the entirety of the Daxamite population, allowing Lena and Mon-El to escape, and really, when did her life turn into the latest Star Wars movie?

Kara comes, and so does Lillian, and now they are going to get back down to Earth and they are going to save the world.

Or at least, that’s what Lena thinks, until Lillian kills the portal without Kara and Mon-El, and she curses herself for falling for her mother’s tricks once again.

(Funny: she keeps letting herself have hope, and it keeps being crushed like an annoying spider, pesky and utterly useless. There’s a lesson, somewhere in there, that’s she’s too blind and stupid to see.)

But she can’t sit around this time, not when she’s on home turf, with her resources and her intuition.

She recruits Kara’s friend Winn (brilliant, nerdy, and kind of hilarious; she makes a note to talk to him more when, _if_, this ever ends) and they reconfigure an old LuthorCorp prototype to disperse lead throughout the atmosphere, trace amounts that won’t hurt a human but are, thankfully, deadly to Daxamites.

(All that talk of not being like the Luthors, and she ends up evicting a whole species from the planet. How horribly ironic.

Cue panic attack, wine, and horrible Netflix baking shows. It’s the only way she knows how to heal.)

It saves the world.

It also forces Kara to launch her boyfriend into space without knowing if she’ll ever see him again.

And that’s just one more thing Lena gets to feel guilty about.

Turns out, saving the world creates a lot of paperwork, so while she readjusts to a semi-normal life, handles the problems created by the Daxamite invasion, and gets L-Corp back on track, Kara works herself into a spiral.

They go weeks without talking, not really by choice (maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t, Lena does tend to push people away without ever really trying), but it hurts just the same. Kara has her job, and Supergirl (which they still haven’t talked about) and she’s dealing with getting over Mon-El, and she doesn’t need Lena weighing her down right now.

Because really, that’s all she feels like. A weight. Something everyone has to deal with.

Not for the first time recently, she pictures what her blood would look like on the tiles of her kitchen floor.

She goes to the doctor, gets stronger meds.

Maybe the meds make her crazy (er), however, because the second Kara mentions Edge making a move on Catco, Lena’s on the phone to Cat Grant, making a deal.

So yeah, buying a multimedia corporation as a scientist and CEO of a biotech conglomerate was probably not the greatest idea, especially when Lena’s only reasoning is that Kara was in danger of _losing her damn job._

(And this isn’t even the first time she’s guilty of hugely romantic gestures disguised as friendly gifts.)

It was a horrible idea, in fact, but a part of her is a little excited to be doing something different for once. Something interesting, and new, and maybe something that can make her feel whole again.

So she puts out a notice for a new CFO to take over at L-Corp while she’s busy with Catco, and it doesn’t take long. Not when she sees Samantha Arias’ profile in the pile.

(So she did go into finance and business after all.)

Lena calls Sam to visit her, the only person she extends an interview to. She knows who she’s hiring the minute the brunette steps into her office.

Sam hasn’t changed a bit: same long legs and infectious smile (it looks like Kara’s, but a bit more mischievous, and Lena loves and hates that she notices things like that now). They greet each other warmly, and Lena can’t help the genuine grin that takes over her features at getting to know the woman again.

Sam is still beautiful, still smart, still wonderful, and when she extends an offer for dinner, Lena almost accepts.

But Kara lingers like a delightful sunbeam at the edge of her consciousness, and she has to turn her down.

“I understand,” Sam tells her. “It’s been a long time.” Indeed it has: Ruby is ten now, a beautiful young girl, and although Lena can’t start it again, not with Kara always there, tangled in the veins of her heart, she agrees to a friendly brunch a few mornings from then, because Sam is someone always worth having in her life.

That’s something she also didn’t consider: working at Catco brings her close to Kara. Like, every day.

It’s not something that she minds, at all, in fact. Yes, it makes her chest squeeze painfully, every time she sees those blue eyes across the bullpen, but Kara is opening up again, coming back to herself, and it’s so, so wonderful.

In fact, girl’s nights return with a vengeance, and Lena is invited to every single one. After Sam and Kara get introduced (the pair are downright terrible together, and Lena regrets ever having them meet), the brunette mom starts tagging along too, and soon Friday nights are Lena’s favorite of the week.

Alex and Maggie, her and Kara, Sam and occasionally Ruby, all of them make up this group of close friends, friends Lena never thought she was going to get. They’re a dysfunctional little family, but they’re a family all the same (her only family had ever been Lex. She feels guilty for abandoning him, but he left her first).

At one of these girl’s nights, in fact, Lena inadvertently comes out with a misplaced comment about Princess Leia, and the response she gets has her glowing for the rest of the weekend. Maggie says that she “knew all along,” Alex seems to feel even more comfortable around her, and Sam reveals their past romantic history, which makes everyone laugh and talk about old college flings.  
  
It also prompts Alex to ask if any of them are straight, which leads to the most heart-stopping thing Lena’s ever experienced: Kara shakes her head.

In hindsight, “you’re not?” was probably not the best thing to say.

Kara shook her head more firmly, a smile growing on her face. “I’m bi.”

Lena swore her heart stopped beating.

_Maybe she has a real chance._

But this is Kara way-out-of-her-league Danvers, a literal superhero (not to mention she’s Lena works-a-lot-never-sleeps-and-is-probably-a-vampire Luthor, emphasis on Luthor), and there was no way she ever had a chance in hell.

The peace of their little family doesn’t last forever, of course, because what does, in Lena’s world? It was all going to end.

Alex and Maggie split, rather painfully, and Alex demands to be left alone for a little while, leaving Kara feeling useless, unmoored, and terrible.

So Lena is there to pick up the pieces.

She spends night after night at Kara’s loft, lets the hero crash at her penthouse sometimes (pretending not to notice when Kara comes in through the balcony instead of the front door), and takes care of her at all hours. They are as close as ever, that November, and it’s one of the first birthdays Lena has spent truly, actually carefree.

That day, Kara makes her breakfast and takes her around the city on a tour of all of her favorite places (the bookstore that sells pretty, leather bound editions of old classics, the best Thai place on the West Coast, a gorgeous park for a walk), then to dinner at a rooftop restaurant, and when she drops her off at home, asks to come inside.

Kara is nervous, and Lena is sure, absolutely sure that she knows what is happening.

(She doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want Kara to say the words. She wants to stay ignorant for a while. Just Kara and Lena against the world. Sometimes, in the dark of night, she can pretend that’s all it’s ever been.)

“Lena,” Kara begins, “I want you to know that I trust you, and I believe in you no matter what, and this... secret, that I’ve kept... kept from you, it’s not... it was out of my control. I wanted to tell... well, I wanted to tell you so bad, and I just... first it was Alex, then J’onn, then...” she trails off.

“Kara, you don’t have to say anything. I understand.”

“No, I want to.” Kara straightens then, removes her glasses.

_She is so, so beautiful._

“Lena, I’m Supergirl. And I know you know, because you’re a genius and my best friend, but I needed to tell you anyway. And that’s my birthday gift to you: my absolute trust.”

And Lena cries.

She cries while Kara holds her, while they talk about it all: Kara, and the secrets, and Krypton, even (Kara lights up like the sun when she talks about home, and Lena wants to make her look like that forever, even if it’s just to memorize the glow of her face; she was always a little selfish).

And then, Kara makes her talk about the weight. The heaviness. The medication, and doctors, and Lillian, her hands and glares and the fear, the dreams of her blood and broken bones and darkness and death.

She cries while Kara holds her. And Kara holds her, and she cries.

And somehow, she feels a little less heavy. A little less cold.

Kara Danvers is that light in the darkness, killing all her shadow and filling her with bright, white, gooey goodness. Kara is an angel.

Kara is her angel.

Lena feels a bit of the ice in her thaw.

They don’t talk of feelings that night, even though they both feel it, the more that moves through them like a physical current. There’s never enough time to talk about it all. But Lena holds out hope that one day they will. They have to, otherwise she might simply combust.

Weeks bring them closer to each other, unable to be apart. Eventually, Lena goes back to L-Corp full time, but she keeps Sam on board, unwilling to let her and Ruby out of her life again, especially since the brunette and Alex have been getting on suspiciously well lately. And of course, she still pops into Catco to visit Kara, unable to go any longer than a day without seeing that blonde hair and those blue eyes. They hang out more than they ever did. Every night is movie night, or game night, or karaoke night. Kara sings like her mother, light and bright and carefree.

After their midnight confessions, Kara, too, seems lighter. No longer does she hide behind glasses and a ponytail. Late movie nights show her at her comfiest, lounging with an open face, her hair down, and Lena has never thought her prettier.

Christmas that year is her first with a real family, her happiest since childhood, since her mother died, since that year in Dublin. She treasures it like nothing else. The whole group is together, Alex and Sam and Ruby and James and Winn and J’onn and Lena. Lena, who has a place among these names, among this family. Lena, who is somewhere where she finally belongs.  
  
But the torture isn’t quite over, because with every day they spend together, every moment they’re breathing the same air, Lena is falling more and more in love with Kara Danvers.

She loves her smile and her laugh and her voice and her loyalty and her strength and her determination and her intelligence and her ferocity and her muscles and her stupid, beautiful face. And Kara has no bloody idea.

It’s slowly killing her inside.

One thing Lena learns, being close to Kara Danvers, is that for parties, she goes all out. New Year’s is no different. So Lena, twenty-four but older in her heart, attends her first New Year’s party with the girl she is madly in love with, the girl’s sister, and the girl’s sister’s girlfriend, who also happens to be one of her closest friends, and loves to tease her.

It isn’t complicated.

Alex finds her at the party, ten o’clock and awkward, nursing a glass of scotch.

“First one, huh?” she asks, and Lena nods, her eyes trained on Kara moving through the crowds like she owns them, the light of the party, shining even into Lena’s dark little corner.

She feels like she’s in college again, stalking her prey around a frat house, but she feels decidedly not in control. That’s just what Kara Danvers does to her.

“You know, there’s two hours to midnight. You should find someone to kiss, Luthor.” Alex says it with purpose, meaning.

Lena looks at her just in time to see her wink.

Midnight comes, and Lena does the most stupid, reckless thing she’s ever done: she stalks straight over to Kara, grabs her sleeve with the hand that isn’t gripping a champagne flute so hard it might crack, spins her around, and presses her lips to hers.

It’s broken, and messy, and closed-lipped, and somehow, it’s everything.

Every part of Lena feels like she’s on fire. The ice that lives in her veins, has lived there since the Daxamite invasion, all of it is gone. Kara has doused her in kerosene and lit the match.

The fire finds home in her abdomen, making her whole body alert and sensitive, clouding her head with thoughts and dreams and the kinds of sweet Kara-scented words like _family_ and _happiness_ she normally tries to block out.

It is single-handedly the best kiss of her life, this tentative press of lips she shares with Kara Danvers.

It feels like the world stops spinning, her blood stops moving, her heart stops beating. It seems impossible anyone else has ever felt this way before; surely Lena and Kara, with their lips and tongues and teeth, have discovered a new sensation, the eighth wonder of the world. It feels like everything she has ever wanted, safety and love and...

And that unattainable thing that until this moment, until this New Year’s Eve on Lena’s twenty-fourth year, has been locked in a cell with a rusty lock, has belonged only to Lex, that thing called _home_, well...

It’s beating with a pulse that says _Kara Danvers._

Ironic, really: a kiss from Supergirl is how she finally lets go of the Luthor destiny.

But Kara isn’t kissing back.

It happens in what feels like seconds: Lena realizes, and steps back, and Kara is staring at her, wide eyed. The room around them has fallen silent, and Lena downs the rest of her champagne in one go, turns on a heel, and disappears down the hallway near the bathroom.

The party resumes, the music loud enough that Lena does not hear the decisive click of Kara’s shoes on the hardwood, not until strong arms are pinning her against the wall and a soft, warm, insistent mouth is on hers.

It feels better than the first time, the fire, like it’s meant to be a part of her, always. It’s like magic, this kiss, and Lena thinks that if she has to live one more moment without Kara Danvers kissing her like this, she might die.

“I love you,” Kara pulls back to whisper, her eyes so blue and her words so pure that Lena surges forward and kisses her again.

“How could I not love you, Kara Danvers?”

Maybe home isn’t with Lex; maybe it never was. Maybe Lillian hadn’t taken everything from her after all. Maybe when her mother drowned, maybe she knew it would take her here, pressed against Kara Danvers, loved and in love, exactly where she was supposed to be.

Maybe it wasn’t her _máthair_, Lex, Veronica, Jack who needed saving.

Maybe it was her.

And of course, of course it was Kara who did it. Her own personal superhero.

So Lena doesn’t believe in fate, or destiny, or the universe pulling them together.

She believes in Kara Danvers.

**Author's Note:**

> translations from gaelic:  
_máthair_ \- mother  
_teidí_ \- teddy bear  
_daidí na nollag_ \- father christmas
> 
> come yell at me @amessofgaywords on twitter.


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